Week Six Work -- Storytelling in the organization

Anne (HUANG Anni)

When I was a junior in SFL, I acted as a teaching assistant to manage the lower grade student's affairs. Once in a staff regular meeting, one of the teachers said that "traditional roll call that usually taken in person by teacher is a very fussy and tedious task. Because it is really difficult to increase student's participation. This morning I have a question for students to translate. Everyone just keeps silent after I show the question. I know most of them want to say something and even they have exact right answer. But they are afraid of speak up in front of other people. In total 10 minutes, the whole class just stays in a quiet situation. That feeling for me is pretty bad. Interaction between the teacher and the students become so difficult so that we have to draw up strategies to overcome it. I read some articles introducing Random Roll Call System, which has a random name picker for appointing one students to be a lucky one from the name list saved in Excel. This can be used to light the free atmosphere in classroom and offer fair opportunity for the individual as well."

The teacher shared us with her idea because she had identify the problem and was trying to figure out solution. It aroused other teachers consensus and they tend to embrace this new technology. The Random Roll Call System began to used in all over the SFL. Through training most teachers enabled to use it in their teaching. It is effective to gain student's attention and encourage them to think positively.


CC (XIE Yuchen)

As for the faculty of education in my former college, before they agree to design a system by faculty itself, teachers attended more than 3 meetings to decide. The tutor guaranteed that his student had talent in programming and the faculty was strong enough to design this system, on the other hand, school promised to give space and material assistance. At the beginning, half teachers hesitated, so the tutor gave a table of collected data to show the possibility of success in terms of economic condition.

Besides, he said a story about his student. “Ignore the excellent skills in programming, he is a lucubrator. Every question that I mentioned in class will be considered as a good learning chance for him, and then when he comes with some problems, he is willing to spend more time in depth thinking. Once there was a bug in my programming which was my teaching text, he went to me and asked for this mistake after 3 days. Finally I realized that he spent 3 days from judging this bug to modification.” Then other teachers agreed this plan and implement this plan with full of confidence. The storytelling is really helpful to acquire trust from others.


Abby（Yao Ruyan）

My story is the thing happened in my third year in ZJUT.

At that time, the faculty newly implemented a new ICT tool in teaching and learning. A part of the teachers were old and not good at the technical things and some young also did not want to use the new tool. One teacher from other major was very actively in promoting the new tool. After a period of observation, he offered a plan to the faculty about how to promote the new technology and a supported group should be formed. Since then, teachers were trained by some teachers who were good at using the tool.  And teachers were also asked to view other teachers' classes to observe how the class goes on with the new tool. After that they would hold a meeting to exchange ideas monthly. The new tool was fully used in the faculty and well supported the teaching.

Janey (HU Jiani)

My story is about my faculty in NJAU. The new leader-group's members introduced a ICT system for language learning in our faculty. However, some old teachers weren't used in using this system. They had some meetings themselves and list some disadvantage of the system, such as it was a waste of time to set up the system in the class period, students might focus on the funny media things but not the class content and so on. The leaders accepted their advises and decided to design series of training courses for the teachers, so they could use the system effectively.

After the training courses, teachers felt the benefit of the system, and adapt to use the system and thought it was really effective for the language learning.

This story told us cooperation is very important for an organization. The opinions from every part of the organization should be considered carefully.